


Open Book

by lilbean



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen, M/M, They love each other, is it slash? who knows, john sleeps, sherlock creeps
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-20
Updated: 2015-05-20
Packaged: 2018-03-31 09:58:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3973819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilbean/pseuds/lilbean
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's the reasonable thought that Sherlock repeats in the most rational part of his mind, the thought that makes this an acceptable way for the two of them to carry on: <i>he chooses this</i>.<br/>--<br/>Set sometime during Series 2. Sherlock considers a sleeping John during a nighttime cab ride. (Feel free to critique.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Open Book

The cab is threading its way through the city at night, through colored lights and modern buildings and cars and cars and an obliviously busy population 8.3 million strong, along the series of angles and curves that'll lead it back to the flat.

Sherlock tilts his face to the taxi's grey ceiling and breathes slowly. It's been a particularly taxing case: not too drawn-out, only fifty or so hours for him to get the answers right, but most of those hours have been spent awake and thinking on his feet, with one night of reading about ancient Roman architecture at the library until four in the morning and another of standing outside a flat until dawn, drinking terrible takeaway coffees and mocking John for getting stuck on hints in his book of crossword puzzles, waiting for a skinny Indian museum guide that never turned up due to the fact that he apparently didn't exist. Then, less than an hour ago back at the gallery, everything had finally come together just as a large belligerent guard—who had reason to want him gone, as all of security was in on the scheme—was dragging him and John away by their collars. He'd shouted out the answer, and there'd been the usual need to explain the obvious and the usual fuss over the mundane, but now they're finally headed back to Baker Street, where no doubt John will be writing up something melodramatic with a catchy title for his blog and Sherlock will criticise it and John will post it anyways and then maybe they'll actually be able to relax. The adrenalin and the nicotine patches and the niggling feeling of not understanding have been enough to combat hunger and fatigue for the past two days, but now that the rush is over and his last patch is almost drained and he understands everything absolutely perfectly, Sherlock finds himself thinking about the biscuits that are probably still out on the counter from tea the day before yesterday (they'll be stale but fine if the ants aren't back) and stretching out on the couch in his dressing gown for a few hours (his bed is covered in the Roman architecture books that he'd tricked John into lifting from the library, as well as a few popsicle stick models and a large pool of model glue that had happened when he'd gotten frustrated).

They've stopped at a crossing, and, not for any useful reason but because when he's just been on a case it’s automatic, his eyes fall on one young woman in the group that strides out in front of the rest and he sees _foot fetishist, pet cat, on her way to break up with her boyfriend_ —or girlfriend, he mustn't forget the mistake with John's sister. Those who need proof that gays are people too must only ask Sherlock: he'll tell them that the mannerisms and physical details that mark people who are stupid with love or heartbreak are practically identical between orientations. It's all about people needing people, people hurting people; boy and girl have nothing to do with it.

As the taxi jerks forward again, he watches the woman walk briskly off down the street with her pedicured toenails peeking out from her BDSM shoes, her face clear and calm but a teary smudge of mascara on the back of her right hand (which has bitten, unkempt nails; the final tip off to the fetish) and a fifteen minute-old scratch on her thigh from when she had yelled into her mobile and her cat had jumped away in alarm.

 _You're a completely open book_ , by the way, he feels like calling after her.

Thinking that he's a little dry as well, he murmurs to John, "I'll tell you the three-word phrase for thirty-one down if you'll make the tea when we get back." He smiles to himself, sure he'll get a laugh or at least an annoyed grunt in response, but instead there's only silence and even breathing from beside him. "John," he says, and still receives no reply, which means that his flatmate is either preoccupied with the date he has the next day or still angry about Sherlock tricking him into stealing the library books, or else that it’s not John next to him at all, which the recent stop at the crossing makes quite possible, especially as Sherlock wasn't paying attention, and he turns quickly to look and then berates himself because as usual the real explanation is that he's forgotten that John is a human being.

The doctor's eyes are shut and his lips are a little parted as he breathes gently in his sleep. He's so completely worn out that he looks almost comatose, his limbs completely limp, his head nestled into the corner between the headrest and window. The slight rise and fall of his chest, the colour in his face, the patch of foggy window where he's been breathing: these are the differences between him and a corpse.

Sherlock reaches out with a long finger and taps John's face lightly. John's nose twitches and he mumbles something that might be "stoppit, Harry" or "stoppit, Sherlock.” When Sherlock repeats the stimulus, for the sake of the scientific method, it's definitely a slurred, irritated "bugg'roff, Sherlock" as John squirms away a little and then relaxes into his deep sleep again.

Turning forwards again, settling back into his seat, Sherlock flips quickly back through the past couple of days and almost immediately finds images of John rubbing at his eyes under the warm glow of a lamp in the library, nodding then jerking awake over a huge book with tiny print; John lingering by a bakery with a longing look on his face at the smell of bread and Sherlock yanking him past it, telling him they've got to keep moving; John close to drifting off as he sits against a brick wall huddled in his jacket, just as Sherlock decides the museum guide isn't coming and kicks at a metal rubbish bin and yells at his friend, who's sat up straight and is blinking in the light of the rising sun, that they've wasted a night. All signs that John was famished and exhausted that Sherlock had passed over because they weren't important to him at the time, because in the mad rush of a case John really is like a skull to talk at, albeit one with useful abilities such as running and shooting and very occasionally thinking. But now that it's done and they're on their way back to the flat, Sherlock is finally recalling that even if he can go for days without food or rest and be perfectly alright, John can't, and that John always ends up getting dragged right along with Sherlock, wherever Sherlock might be off to next.

There's the reasonable thought that Sherlock repeats in the most rational part of his mind, the thought that makes this an acceptable way for the two of them to carry on, even when he sees John gag at a spleen experiment sitting on the kitchen counter or swallow back a hurt expression at something Sherlock's said without thinking, even when he looks over at the stocky blond man crouching with him behind a parked car, panting and clutching a gun. _He chooses this_. John can always find a better flatmate, find a better friend, find a less exciting way to spend his weekends, but _he chooses this_.

 _But it's not a choice for most people, is it?_ Sherlock remarks to himself. _Just ask the kinky cat girl. She'll tell you._

Sherlock is very good at observing to understand, better than anyone, but finds himself somewhat unpracticed in the art of observation for it’s own sake. There’s a lingering sense of impracticality as he takes in the way the patterned light of a blue-and-red sign passes over John's face, the different places (neck, temple, wrist) that he can make out a pulse if he watches hard enough, the small motions of John's dreaming eyes behind his lids, and the bone structure underneath the facial muscles underneath the soft skin. He doesn't worry about John waking up to find himself being studied. Maybe there’d be a moment of self-conscious annoyance, but he’d the move on to resigned acceptance. As he always does. In the social situations full of endless cues and rules that Sherlock doesn't in the least have the time for, the ones where the expectation that he’ll remotely know how to handle the fragility and arrogance of people at the least gives him a headache and at the most makes him rage and shout until everybody leaves him alone, John is the one that rolls his eyes and then forgives him, that apologises for him and calls him an insensitive prick and then is ready to listen to Sherlock's newest monologue as if nothing's happened. It's part of why he's valuable, this infuriatingly normal and simple man whom Sherlock has known for less than four months. Why he’s important, in an alarming way.

It's a weakness. He's well aware of that that. There are few deaths that Sherlock would be moved to note, fewer still that he would be moved to mourn, and yet there he'd stood that night, looking at John in the rippling blue light of the swimming pool and trying not to let any of the panic and anger and _this isn't playing fair_ out because if he lost control it could kill them both, searching for a clever solution or exit and finding none and realising that this what real fear and powerlessness are like, when someone else has bombs strapped to his torso and a sniper's rifle pointed at his heart and you're the one completely immobilised. And as uncaring as he’d tried to appear, as little as he’d tried to look at John, Jim Moriarty had smiled because he’d understood the extent of this new weakness as much as Sherlock suddenly and dizzyingly had.

He has a plan, now. A contingency, if John should die. Not _if_. _When_. It's always _when_.

He'll go away. Far away, to the quietest, emptiest place he can find, a deep forest or an uninhabited island, and spend a year forgetting, a year letting go a little more each day until by the end he'll be as empty as he was of John Watson back before he knew the man existed. Sherlock knows from prior experience, for certain, that he can survive and thrive without him, that he can live his life alone and do very well by anyone's standards. There won't be beige jumpers and bad cologne and there won't be the running joke about the subtle complexities of the automated checkout at the grocery and there won't be bickering over whether or not there’s any point in playing another round of Monopoly when Sherlock clearly has it rigged somehow, and there’ll be no one calm and curious to talk to anymore, just the frenzied feverish arguments with himself that leave him craving the serenity of nicotine and opiates. But once all the associated memories are gone, once he's alone in his head again, going without the warm and steady presence that is John will only be a dull ache, just like the dull ache of when he hasn't slept or eaten, a feeling he can walk around with in the pit of him and easily ignore. All Sherlock needs to continue on living are the cases and as long as death is still a _when_ , not an _if_ , he'll have them.

He knows that normal friendships aren't calculated like this, but normal friendships aren't potentially fatal. Normal friendships aren't fueled by adrenalin and adventure, built on crimes and deaths and the few calms that come between.

As he looks at the soldier beside him, idly counts the number of slow soft breaths per second and deduces what stores they're passing by the different colors and shapes that move over the motionless form, he makes himself believe for a moment that John would understand, if John could see the inside of Sherlock's head like Sherlock can see the insides of everyone else's. That he'd understand the significance of the fact that Sherlock has allotted him a full year, not the concentrated week it'd take for Lestrade or the months it'd take for Mrs. Hudson but more than three times longer than the two of them have known each other, an entire orbit of the earth around the bloody sun--he isn't able to delete that particular useless fact anymore--to really be rid of the crippling handicap that he's seen hundreds of times in the widows and children and best friends of the dead, the thing that repels and terrifies him, the grief.

And if John was really looking, like Sherlock really looks, maybe he'd see the secret thought that Sherlock repeats in the darkest part of his mind, the thought that makes his concrete plan dangerously close to a fantasy. The doubt that leaving and hiding and forgetting would work. That a year, or ten, or a lifetime, would be enough to stop the needing and hurting Sherlock's recently discovered.

Moriarty’s got it wrong. _That's_ what people do. And after less than four months of Doctor John Watson by his side, it turns out that Sherlock might be a person, after all.

And then John's eyelids move a little, and then they open slowly, and when he sees Sherlock staring hard at him, he smiles his tired smile, with a question in it, as if asking if everything is all right.

Then, suddenly, his eyebrows knot together and his eyes light up, and he says, "'Partners-in-crime', that's what bloody thirty-one down was, wasn't it, you smug bastard?"

"Exactly right," says Sherlock.

John grins. "Two days of hell were worth it for that." He shifts his shoulders into another position, crossing his arms over his chest, his head coming to rest on the window so his hair gets a little mussed. "You're definitely making the tea when we get back," he yawns, and mouth still smiling, his eyes drift shut again.

After a pause, Sherlock says out loud, “You’re a completely open book, by the way.”

A pause, and then a slow, sleepy, breathy laugh. “Hope I’m a good read.”

The cab threads its way between dark and light, along the angles and curves of the living and dying city, and Sherlock realises that it’s not taking them back to the flat. That for better or for worse, it’s taking them home.


End file.
